312 IOWA DEPARTMENT OP AGRICULTURE 
FRIDAY MORNING, 10:00 O'CLOCK. 
President: On account of some of the commission men going 
away at 2 o'clock it has been decided to sell the butter at 12 o'clock 
or soon after the close of this meeting. We will now listen to an 
address by L. H. Paul, on "The Silo." 
THE SILO. 
L. H. PAUL, AXAMOSA, IOWA. 
Your committee has asked me to give a tallv at this meeting on the 
question of cheaper production of dairy products from the viewpoint of 
the man who raises the feed, milks the cows and cleans out the barns. 
There seems to be something wrong with this part of the dairy business. 
A large number of men have told me during the past year that their cows 
did not bring them enough to pay for the feed they ate. At the same 
time consumers of dairy products all along the line complain of the high 
prices of the same. Now, these two complaints are so common that we 
are led to believe that both are right and If this is so there must be some- 
thing wrong. Either it is costing the farmer too much to produce the 
milk or the plan of manufacturing and delivering is to expensive, making 
the finished product too high to the consumer, and I take it that the 
object of a meeting like this is to get the producer of raw material and 
the manufacturer together and if possible learn some plan by which the 
costly features may be eliminated and better methods introduced so that 
every one from the producer to the consumer may get just compensation 
for the labor done and the manufactured products still be produced at a 
price that the consumer can afford to pay. Our opinion is that the solu- 
tion of this question of cheaper production lies almost entirely with the 
man who keeps the cows. We have long rows of figures on the value of 
our dairy products for the county, state and nation. We have it figured 
for us that one-third of the cows of Iowa are kept at an actual loss; that 
another third just plays even and that all the profits made must be made 
by this last one-third of all the cows. Still I doubt if there is a farmer 
in Iowa who knows what it costs to produce a pound of butter on his own 
farm. Small neglects make large failures. All the great manufacturers 
of the country put in all their days and some of them a large part of 
their nights studying how to cheapen the cost of their product. 
While this is a question to which we farmers have given very little 
thought, many of us have plowed the same old fields and harvested the 
same old crops that our fathers did; we feed and milk the same kind of 
cows in the same old way. Some of our fathers started life with nothing 
and held their own through all the changing years and some of us have 
done as well, but on some farms we are pleased to note that the highway 
cow and the long horned steer have passed away. The thunder does not 
sour the milk any more, and cows have quit dying with hollow horn and 
wolf in the tail. As the world becomes more thickly settled, the struggle 
for existence becomes harder; the farmers of the world are driven into the 
